The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

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Friday, July 8, 2016

Turkey: Victim of Its Own Enthusiasm for Jihad - Burak Bekdil

by Burak Bekdil

"Infidels who were enemies of
Islam thought they buried Islam in the depths of history when they
abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924 ... We are shouting out that we
will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament." —
Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief of Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey.

"The magazine [Dabiq] creates propaganda for [ISIS]. It has an open address. Why does no one raid its offices?" — Opposition MP Turkey's Parliament.

The government big guns in Ankara just shrugged it off when on June
5, 2015, only two days before general elections in the country,
homegrown jihadist militants for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syia
(ISIS, or ISIL or IS) detonated bombs, killing four people and injuring
over 100, at a pro-Kurdish political rally.

Again, when IS, on July 20, 2015, bombed a meeting
of pro-Kurdish peace activists in a small town on Turkey's Syrian
border, killing 33 people and injuring over 100, the government behaved
as if it had never happened. After all, a bunch of "wild boys" from the
ranks of jihad -- which the ruling party in Ankara not-so-secretly
aspires to -- were killing the common enemy: Kurds.

Then when IS jihadists, in October, killed over 100 people
in the heart of Ankara, while targeting, once again, a public rally of
pro-peace activists (including many Kurds), the Turkish government put
the blame on "a cocktail of terror groups"
-- meaning the attack may have been a product of Islamists, far-leftist
and Kurdish militants. "IS, Kurdish or far-leftist militants could have
carried out the bombing," the prime minister at the time, Ahmet
Davutoglu, said.
It was the worst single terror attack in Turkey's history, and the
Ankara government was too demure even to name the perpetrators. An indictment
against 36 suspects, completed nearly nine months after the attack,
identified all defendants as Islamic State members. So there was no
"cocktail of terror." It was just the jihadists.

In the last year, there had been further jihadist acts of terror,
targeting Turks and foreign tourists, but with relatively few casualties
up to now. At an Istanbul airport, however, a mysterious explosion,
which the authorities hastily attempted to cover up, was probably the
precursor of the latest mega-attack in Istanbul. The management at
Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport said
on Dec. 23, 2015 that: "There was an explosion at the apron and
investigation regarding its cause is progressing ... Fights have
resumed." That unidentified explosion consisted of three or four mortars
fired at a passenger plane parked at the apron. The attack killed one
unfortunate cleaner.

The incident was quickly "disappeared" from the public memory. One
person dying in a mysterious explosion was too minor for a collective
Turkish memory that had grown used to casualties coming in the dozens.
It was, in fact, a powerful message from the terrorists: We will target
your lifeline -- air traffic.

Every year about 60 million travelers pass through Istanbul's main
airport, Ataturk. Turkey is now building an even bigger airport that
will host 150 million passengers a year. Completing the mission from
December's "minor and unresolved" attack at the Sabiha Gokcen Airport,
the terrorists visited Ataturk Airport on June 28, killing at least 45 and injuring hundreds of people.

Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said that it was "probably" an attack by IS. Days later, the suicide bombers were identified as jihadists of Central Asian origin.

In a state of perpetual denial, Turkey's Islamist rulers are still
too bashful to admit any linkage between political Islam and violence.
Ironically, their denial exposes their country to the risk of even more
Islamic terror. Worse, the political Islam they fuel in their own
country is growing millions of potential jihadists at home. In November,
a Pew Research Center study
found that 27% of Turks (more than 20 million) did not have an
unfavorable opinion of IS -- compared to, say, 16% in the Palestinian
territories.

In March, only three months before the latest jihadist attack in
Istanbul, thousands of supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir -- a global Islamist
group, viewed by Russia and Kazakhstan as a terrorist group but that
defines itself as a political organization aiming to "lead the ummah"
[Islamic community] to the re-establishment of the caliphate and rule
with sharia law -- gathered at a public sports hall
in Ankara, courtesy of the Turkish government, to discuss the
re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate. In his speech, Mahmut Kar,
the media bureau chief of Hizb-ut Tahrir Turkey said:

"Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried
Islam in the depths of history when they abolished the caliphate on
March 3, 1924 ... We are hopeful, enthusiastic and happy. Some 92 years
later... we are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate,
here, right next to the parliament."

It was not a coincidence that an opposition MP on July 1 took the
speaker's point at the Turkish parliament, showed a copy of a magazine, Dabiq, largely viewed as IS's press organ, to an audience and said:
"This is [IS's] official magazine. It is published in Turkey. Its fifth
issue is out now. The magazine creates propaganda for [IS]. It has an
open address. Why does no one raid its offices?"

That question will probably remain unanswered.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8406/turkey-victim-jihad Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.